


a light burning out

by simaetha



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Experimental, Gen, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-08-09
Packaged: 2018-04-13 19:50:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4535118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simaetha/pseuds/simaetha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sauron: and the nature of failure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a light burning out

Clear pale skies, the world a bright flicker of light and shade as the tree-branches move in the breeze, a city all of white stone and tall columns raised up towards the arch of heaven, with fountains singing in the courtyards and the river a gleaming silver mirror to the morning sun.

"Not to imitate Aman," you are saying, "but to do _better_. The light of the Trees might be gone, but when did it ever reach Middle-earth, or come as more than a glimmer to the lands east of the Pelóri? _Healing_ the world - but it's not a thing that was made and then damaged; the work of creation was never perfected to begin with - "

"O, soaring ambition!" your companion says, laughing. You walk together, and the sunlight glints in his dark hair, brightens his face as he speaks. "To outshine the sun and stars, and build Eregion fairer than Valinor - and what a thing to strive for, even if not achieved - "

"How splendid the failure, then!" you say. "What might we _not_ achieve, in reaching out to bring such an intention into the world - "

Enough.

Time compressed into an instant: move it forward a few centuries. The city falling, broken stone and shattered towers, the glint of fire upon steel, sunset burning on the river as the sky turns black, smoke rising from destruction's forge.

The knife in your hand - and you will turn friendship into violence, take your affection out on him in savagery, his body only another thing to break, ribs hands viscera a pulp of meat and bone like any other -

Lord of Wolves, is this carrion-feast the end you always wanted, this charnel-field of slaughter, where the scavengers tear with bloody maws at the bodies of the dead? Was this the limit of your high imaginings?

***

Back, this time, unwinding the coil of years: there were other battles.

A shattered land, volcanic, the earth shuddering with aftershocks, and the first of the storms that will scour continents for decades after black on the horizon, casting lightning-flickers across a scene of hot ash and fragmented bedrock.

"And how will _you_ judge me," you say, "herald of Manwë, loyal servant, you who let the centuries pass sitting at your master's feet upon the white slopes of unstained Taniquetil, untouched by any care - "

" _Servant of the Enemy_ ," the other snaps, "do you think I have not seen your hand in all his works? Let your defeated master destroy and corrupt - that was _your_ contriving that set in order his vile legions; that bred and armed the foul weapons I saw swarm forth from Angband's lightless pits - "

Your smile is sharpened as a blade-edge, a swift flash of teeth.

"Yes," you say.

And then you laugh, and cast aside the weapon in your hand, the steel raising a brief dust of ash about your feet where it falls.

Admirable one, when did you realise yourself defeated? When your master fled and cowered in his prison of iron, grovelling for mercy, that high dark power reduced to cringe and whine at the final extremity of his own weakness? Or when you saw your own works break and fall, set as a hindrance beneath the feet of that bright host from across the sundering seas?

When was it you first realised the futility of your efforts, the service to a petty power that came in the end to nothing, your name dragged down with his?

***

If you felt regret - a half-hearted, contingent thing, a repentance that was as much as to say that your pride could not withstand the knowledge of your own failure - you subsumed it in ambition.

You hold light in your hands: a glitter of brightness, faceted stone that drinks in sunlight and flings it back undiminished, set in a coil of silvered metal, to bear at forehead or throat.

"No Silmaril," you say easily, "but fair enough - "

"Fair work indeed," your companion says, smiling, reaching out to twine his fingers with the shining chain of the setting, "and a fine beginning. If the outset of our efforts can produce such jewels as this - "

"Then how much greater shall we make before the ending," you say, and watch his face light with agreement. "If an end there is to come - for who can say what we might yet create between us, you and I - "

O cruel one, Deceiver, was betrayal always your design, then? When you took his hand in yours, were you waiting even then to pare the flesh away from it, tear and shred the muscle and bone?

What did you _want_ from your time in Eregion?

***

Go back further, this time, into the deep past before the first of the Eldar ever awoke by that starlit lake: after the fall of the Lamps, before the rising of the Sun, the Trees merely a glimmer on the horizon of Valinor.

You kneel, your hair falling about your shoulders as you bow your head - but this is an approximation, the language of your communication rendered imperfectly into the forms of the body, the angles of your submission translated into substance and image. The Children of Ilúvatar are yet to be envisaged. You are fire and light.

"To serve you, Lord - " you are saying, and look up -

And if you are incommunicable, what translation shall serve for your master, for He Who Arises In Might, the mountain with its smoking crown, the searing black emptiness of the void and the radiant fire of annihilation that fuels stars, the endless gravitic fall into night, the principle of entropy that gnaws at the heart of the universe, the world's marring and its violation?

His words are unvoiceable; his speech is injury.

But you -

The thought in your mind is not of service but of _power_ , the ability to effect your designs without hindrance or hesitation, an imitation of that black inevitable force enthroned before you, that speaks and the world trembles.

Say that you and your master reflect each other. Say that each of you share that same desire, to reach out into the world and take it, set your own hand upon it, make it yours.

And yet say also -

***

"For I perceive that you love this Middle-earth," you say, "as do I - "

This work you once achieved, together: to heal and to preserve, fight back the weariness of time, challenge the inevitability of decay and of death, throw your defiance against the world's slow inexorable ending.

***

This is the end it came to: the broken city, the death of its lord, your own hands bright with gold and wet with blood, a fire kindled that will scorch across the lands and make a burnt offering of Númenor before, finally, consuming itself in Mordor an age of the world from now, the bright flame of your spirit guttering out in ashes and desolation.

Abhorred one, did you ever let yourself think it could have been otherwise, after -

 


End file.
